Gamasutra Member Blogs: From Playing Life to Psychology In Multiplayer Games

[In highlights from Gamasutra's Member Blogs, our bloggers write about diverse topics, such as how games try to mimic life, a better way to learn how to program, adding psychology to multiplayer games, and more.]

Member Blogs can be maintained by any registered Gamasutra user, while invitation-only Expert Blogs -- also highlighted weekly -- are written by selected development professionals.

We hope that our blog sections can provide useful and interesting viewpoints on our industry. For more information, check out the official posting guidelines.

Looking at how games try to mimic life, we can see how we in life can make use of the simplification and structure taking place within games. Jonas Johansson discussses attaining higher levels by taking inspiration from our virtual environments.

Predicting your opponent and bluffing. Adding these types of psychology to multiplayer games is a great way to increase depth, longevity, social interaction, and accessibility. Michael Parker asks, "Should we see more of it?"

Michael Martin is a big fan of artificial intelligence, and recently tried creating a simple game with adaptive enemy AI driven by a genetic algorithm. Here he examines his approach to implementing the GA, as well as some lessons learned.